It Is Written Medisonship

It Is Written Medisonship from It Is Written Oceania on Vimeo.

Many things have happened since our last post (again!).

Firstly, we took another BAC/DDCS group to the Solomon Islands. Once again, we did kids clubs during the morning and painted the Girls dorm in the evenings.

We had a team of 13 students and 7 adults.






This is Nusatupe airstrip at Gizo. Yes, it is just long enough for a (small!) plane to land on. Seeing the kids expressions as it came into view was quite worth it.










This is the girls 'bathroom' at Kukudu Adventist College.










After what can only be described as a miracle, the paint gun finally worked and we were able to paint the walls of the Girls dorm.

It took us around 3 days to clean the dorms, even before we could start cutting in the edges.











Next, we have bought a lovely little (460 acres) property between Armidale and Kempsey. We've got to buy a 4WD to get onto the property, we've also got to 'make' roads. Very exciting.


























Out little Noah is going well. We've discovered the dog friendly beach at The Spit-Gold Coast. It's Noah's favourite! He's not too sure of the water though.









He's also been enjoying coming in at night for a while during these colder months.

What is important for Sonja and Clinton?

A cool new tool on the web is Wordle. It creates images of words. More frequently occurring words are bigger. We ran our blog through this tool and found that our friends must have been getting married a lot, we work at a school and we have a puppy! I guess that will just increase the count of those words....

Fast Forward

Much has happened since our last post.
1. We got a dog
2. We went to a wedding
3. We had our first wedding anniversary

Let's start with the most important thing first - puppy! I had been bugging Clinton for ages about getting a puppy. I had my heart set on a Miniature Pinscher. They are gorgeous and have some wonderful qualities, and would suit our medium-sized backyard. Unfortunatley, there aren't many up in QLD... and the few that are around were around $700-800! After many weeks of searching the internet, I found a little red male for $400 in Tamworth.

Enter Noah.

This is the little face that was posted on the internet, how could I resist??


After much growing, here are some recent photos:



Noah is quite a happy puppy (now 4.5 months old). His favourite things to do are tear apart any toys, particularly if they squeak, chase the ball, be chased, go on skink-patrol, go on moth-patrol, and eat! He particularly loves going down to the dog park to play with the other dogs, but likes to keep near Sonja or Clinton incase any of them scare him!


The day before our wedding anniversary, two of our great friends, Braden & Mandi got married! It was a lovely wedding. It was held at the Toowoomba church, with the reception in the hall. Here are some photos.




It was a lovely wedding, even more special because it was our first wedding anniversary the day after. Unfortunately, school started for Clinton and I came down with a cold, so our anniversary was a bit of a low key event. Clinton did get me some beautiful flowers though!

The Big Wet

Well, after a few days of really high humidity and little sleep at night, today the land turned to water! When the rain fell, it really fell! The joy of my room at school is that there is no covering to reach the main school buildings, so the kids didn't want to go out. For that matter, neither did I! So I didn't! I stayed hiding in my room, doing all my paperwork.

Well, I did that for as long as that lasted. Suddenly, the power went out. Lights, computers, all of it. I discovered that water had been pouring into the art room next door. As our building is lower than most of the school the water flowed down the pipes and out into the teacher's room! There was a good 5cms of water lying on the floor! As if that wasn't enough, the water started flowing out of the power box! It was this that brought the maintenance guys and the Principal running, which resulted in the power being turned off ASAP!

Then I turned around and caught a glimpse of the creek! I did a double take! It was flowing like a river! The Principal told me that it was flowing over the road-bridge! Insane! The new foot-bridge was still standing tall.

Brisbane city was underwater. Cars were stacked on top of each other, with water up to the windows! Apparently it was the heaviest rainfall in 9 years!

Norman Hotel car park

Eating out....

There is a restaurant called the Loving Hut in Mount Gravatt. I have been wanting to try it for some time. Sonja had visited this place with work a year ago and didn't really appreciate the soy iced chocolate. As such it had been on the back-burner for awhile. Needing to get out, we decided to give a go tonight.

It is a vegetarian restaurant complete with Eastern save-the-animals ideology. There was this brochure about vegetarianism which included an interview with some grand master. On the brochure was a list of famous vegetarians which included Jesus Christ. I might be mistaken, but I thought Christ ate fish.

For entrée we had soy chicken nuggets - kind of like the nuggets that Sanitarium used to make. They were quite good. For main, I ordered a Singapore noodle dish (for about $10) and Sonja a meat-and-veges dish (also for about $10). Sonja's vegetable's had a gravy type sauce of which pepper seemed to be the principle ingredient. It was way too much for either of us. Her meat type thing was okay. My Singapore noodles were good. They had a bit too much coriander and could have benefited from a greater variety of flavours.

We would go again. We would both get different dishes. One of the main attractions of the shop is a freezer full of different soy meats. Perhaps this will provide opportunity for many creations of our own!

School starts again....

So we're back on the 'rollercoaster'. Second week of school. Kids are sounding out the teachers, teachers are trying to convince the students they're not to be messed with... Meanwhile we're getting some lovely rain. Hmmm....

Garden is growing well, would put up some photos if we had a camera... Yep, we've lost it. *insert sad face* It's either somewhere on the property, or in amongst luggage that hasn't been sorted through yet. Or lost in the depths of someone's car.

Property? Yes, we're planning on buying 460 acres of bush. We'll have to clear the road into the property, make the driveway which includes clearing a patch through the river, and slash waist high grass and growth. Yep, sounds fun. More to come soon.